Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the role played by UK-based companies in addressing COVID-19.

United Kingdom-based companies have played a major role in working with the Department on some of the most challenging healthcare areas of the response to COVID-19. These have included:

- building UK manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE) capacity by signing contracts to manufacture over three billion items of PPE with over 30 UK-based companies; and

- at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in March there were more than 8,000 mechanical ventilators in hospitals across the UK. As of the end of July we now have over 30,000 mechanical ventilators available to the National Health Service. 14,679 of these are from new suppliers responding to the Prime Minister’s ventilator challenge and are mostly made in the UK.